Thank you for the overwhelming response for Data Analytics webinar video. More than 800 attendees, 70+ questions.
Watch the video on YouTube (use 720P) or Download (MP4, 188 mb, 60 min) and view on your PC. A big thank you to the Microsoft and Economic Times team for making this possible.

In just one hour, learn how to gather data, how to clean it quickly and smartly, how to summarize, visualize and analyze it and share your results with others. At the end of the session there will be a Q&A segment as well. Forward this to your friends and colleagues as well.

This is an amazing feature which is largely unknown. Just create desired calculations in Excel, publish to SharePoint and now, parameters can be changed on a browser page with automatic recalculation. ZERO programming!

Microsoft Office Specialists

Microsoft Office Specialists is a certification of Office skills. There is a World Championship for it. The finals for India were conducted on 23rd May in New Delhi. 150 finalists attended. 6 of them won the contest and will represent India in the global championship. I spoke at the event as a guest speaker. Competing students, parents, educators and media attended the session. I spoke to them about the need for continued learning and breadth of knowledge. Have a look.

How to do Page Down Up using the mouse

One precaution you must take while presenting is to check if the projector lamp is set to maximum brightness. Usually all projectors have two settings: Standard (or Normal) and Eco. The Eco mode shows dimmer image and saves energy. Make sure you set it to Standard mode for audience size of 10 or above.

While conducting a session at Delhi VAT department, I came across a Sony projector which had THREE settings: High, Standard and Low. Factory setting was Normal. I changed it to HIGH and got brilliant display. There were 60+ attendees – so this brightness boost was most useful.

Moral of the story: Reach early and check the lamp mode settings for EVERY projector you come across.

On many occasions, my sessions are labeled as “tips and tricks”. I don’t like the term “tips and tricks” being used for my lectures or workshops. Many people ask me the reason behind it. Therefore I thought I will explain the thought process behind it in this article.

Read the previous article to understand how to Pin commonly used programs to taskbar. But recently, I went beyond this. I thought – the order in which these icons are pinned should also matter. You can easily drag them around to rearrange – that part is easy. But why would I want them in a particular order?

I solved that problem recently. I had to create the quiz for the Microsoft and Economic Times productivity competition. I had to create many quiz questions and associated images. During this process, I had a very repetitive activity to be done. I would create an image in Camtasia Editor, save it to file system (File Explorer), Save it to my blog (in IE), then preview it in another browser (chrome), add it to my database (Excel), find related article (IE) and then update it in Excel.

After doing this few times, I realized that the order of all the icons is not optimal. So I arranged them in the order I just described – as per my work flow.

And then it became extremely easy for me to do that repetitive work. Moreover, if I forgot exactly which step I was on, I just had to look at the currently active application – look at its icon and then the next icon was my next step – a visual progress indicator on task bar.

There is one more thing. If you want the first icon application press Windows 1, for second one Window 2 and so on.. at least till first 9 applications it is good. (Thanks Khushnood for the inputs). In the above screenshot, Windows 1 will START the first application (SnagIt). Windows 2 will NOT open another File Explorer instance – but it will show existing instances – if there was only one instance, it will open it. If there were multiple instances, it will show all of them just above the taskbar so that you can choose the one you need.

Try it out next time you are performing repetitive complex operations like the way I just described. Enjoy.

The technical term is called PIN. Right click on any application that is running and choose Pin to Task bar. Also notice that the commonly used files appear there. You can PIN commonly used files as well so that you can open them in just one click. Browsers, Office applications and all other applications you use commonly should be pinned to task bar.

What else can be pinned? Even common web pages can be pinned. Drag from the icon in the address bar and drop it on the task bar – as shown above.

Also notice the right click menus – apart from showing recent files, these have interesting options as well.